1. Field
Example embodiments of the present disclosure relate to a 3D video compressing method and apparatus, and more particularly, to a technology that decreases an amount of calculation used to compress a 3D video and a number of bits generated after the compression.
2. Description of the Related Art
A stereoscopic video is a three dimensional (3D) video that simultaneously provides configuration information about a depth and a space. In this instance, videos taken from different viewpoints are needed to provide different videos that appear as if seen from different directions depending on a viewpoint of an observer. In contrast, stereo vision videos merely provide an video having a different viewpoint for each of a left eye and a right eye. However, it is difficult to sufficiently procure a network infrastructure, terrestrial bandwidth, and the like, when videos taken from various viewpoints are compressed for transmission, since the videos taken from various viewpoints require a large amount of data.
Accordingly, the amount of data being generated during the compression may decrease when a depth video that is generated is compressed together with videos of a portion of viewpoints among the videos of various viewpoints, instead of compressing all the video of various viewpoints and transmitting the compressed video. Thus, when transmitting the compressed depth video with the videos of a portion of the viewpoints, the amount of data transmitted is less than the amount of data transmitted when transmitting all the compressed videos. The depth video is generally estimated by a method of estimating a depth video from a predetermined multi-view video, instead of a method that uses many depth cameras.
Here, the depth estimation is a process that uses a large number of calculations similar to motion estimation, and expends a long time in a multi-view video compression process.
Accordingly, there is a desire for a method and an apparatus capable of effectively compressing a 3D video by effectively performing depth estimation when the 3D video is compressed for transmission.